How to change education
The internet is evolving. In its early days it thrived on selling pornography, then it became just about selling, then it became about social networks. The internet is now becoming more and more about learning. The Massively Online Open Courses have accelerated this process. The internet is a limitless learning machine but university degrees and diplomas still monopolise knowledge trade. The problem is that the knowledge, the learning we get from the internet still needs to be verified in some way in order for us to trade in it and buy it. But if the internet could become as much a vehicle for knowledge verification as it is an instrument of learning, the universities would cease to intermediate between you and the people who generate and pass on knowledge. Students and their families would free themselves of the cost of the army of university administrators and their brick and concrete cost structures: such as lecture halls to listen to last year’s lecture regurgitated yet again and campuses to hang out on as if any public space wouldn’t do for that. Gone would be the ridiculous private libraries. And students’ families would no longer have to fund two homes for their child, at home and at uni, a cost by ifself over £5,000 per year. No more intellectual apartheid as exam performance would no longer be the basis of students getting corralled away into different grades of campus, and separated completely away from the rest of society, like so much cattle for the jobs market. But how could the internet verify our learning? If a student has undertaken a series of internet-based studies how do they prove that they have learnt? How do we test that someone has learnt things on the internet? How to prove who has learnt what, when and by how much? And how do we compare one course of studies against another? How do we even go about identifying who has learnt? And how do we avoid creating another internet walled garden such as Amazon or e-Bay where we have to pay a high price in order to make use of what should be an open free market? What is needed is a kind of proof of work in the way a Bitcoin transaction is verified by its own proof work. Ideally like Bitcoin we could create a distributed database of learning transactions that would be open to everyone proving our knowledge outcomes. So why not use a Bitcoin like solution and create a currency of learning transactions? This knowledge Bitcoin, let’s call it Spennies (study pennies), would record transactions between learners and verifiers. The quality of the learning would be verifiable in terms of who has paid who and how much but of course also non-financial reputational information about the quality of the service. A Bitcoin like solution would create a global trading currency for knowledge products with minimal if any transactions costs. The student and teacher would both have a financial audit trail - an accumulation of knowledge capital both paid and received. However, there are two major drawbacks with Bitcoin as a knowledge currency. Bitcoin is massively volatile and anonymous. We want people to know how much we have learnt and want to measure that knowledge value over time, the currency needs a stable value. We would want a cryptocurrency that would be a stable currency. This could be done if the Spenniess were rendered spend only (Spenny would also mean “spend only” pennies as well as “study” pennies). If there was a Spenny central broker with the power to create Spennies, a central broker voted for by Spenny members, this broker could buy up Spennies when people speculate on the currency trying to push it up and buy back the Spennies when there is an attack on the currency pushing it down. Spennies could be only partially anonymous. When a Spenny member registers they wouldn’t need to give their actual name and address but they would record a video of themselves which would act as audio/visual identification of knowledge acquisiiton going forward. People verifying the member’s knowledge could then identify the student. But who would verify the verifiers and what would they be verifying? Firstly the assessments would be video recorded and successful assessments would be available for anyone one to view, we call this an “Open Assessement”. Apart from being a fantastic educational resource the open assessments would enable the community of Spenny members to police the market themselves. Secondly verifiers would only verify chunks of knowledge, for example just a single MOOC course for a single Spenny member. Finally the Spenny central broker that controls the value of Spennies, would also audit the value of Spenny knowledge verifications looking for fraud. This central audit team would be able to fund this audit work through the creation of Spennies by the central Spenny broker that can create currency. Sometimes we don’t want to verify knowledge to other people, we just want to verify it to ourselves. Having a network of proven assessors would be useful even if we did not require public recognition of our learning. What should a verifier verify? In the age of internet just knowing stuff does not have much currency. What matters in the internet age is being able to learn - to have learnt to learn. It is not what you know but how you know it. In order to learn about something you need to have a certain level of knowledge and particularly understanding. The fact that you have taught yourself would be key, demonstrating you have learnt to learn. Creativity would be an even higher scorer. But the highest standard for a knowledge capitalist would perhaps not be that you have learnt to learn but you have learnt to teach and particulary teaching people to think. In today’s educational system teachers are often bored civil servants who spend most of the time just trying to manage the classroom. In knowledge capitalism bored teachers would need to look for another job but great teachers would become internet learning rock stars like Vi Hart and Imran Khan of the Khan Academy, with massive numbers of internet hits and thousands of followers. A knowledge trading market would need predefined standards of knowledge attainment against which verifications can be benchmarked. These standards could still be based around old school thinking: level 1 - diploma level pass equivalent level 2 - diploma level distinction equivalent level 3 - first year degree level grade 2 equivalent level 4 - first year degree level grade 1 equivalent level 5 - second year degree level grade 2 equivalent level 6 - second year degree level grade 1 equivalent level 7 - third year degree level grade 2 equivalent level 8 - thrid year degree level grade 1 equivalent level 9 - masters level equivalent level 10 - doctorial level equivalent This would not mean that you are being awarded a diploma or degree, it would just mean the level at which you learnt was at diploma or degree level. It would be about verification and not about qualification to some title and honours ceremony. It would be key that students understand how these levels are assessed. The sudent have a right to properly understand what it takes to get to diploma, degree or doctorate level. Students would have something to aim for if there would be free access to view videos of successful assessments in a given field of learning. We would add another level to the old school levels. This would be “entry level” which would be basic skills in language, maths, science thinking. These are skills that a student needs to have before you can start to be able to teach themselves on the internet. Pre-entry level learning would still best be taught in a traditional school setting but with the support of the internet in the classroom. Schools develop social confidence as skills as well as learning. But rather than waiting to reach are certain age before you leave school your schooling would finish once you have completed Internet Entry level. You could stay on in school if you were struggling. And having struggled to complete Entry level would not prejudice the quality of learning experience you get when you do become an internet learner. And this would not mean Entry Level is all you can ever aspire to. A major advantage of the Spenny system is that students could choose how they want to be verified. For example students might opt for a relatively more expensive series of assess-as-you-go verifications of course work (which could be made cheaper by including peer-peer assessment as part of this process) or the cheaper yet higher risk option - a final intensive assessment in one hit requiring less teacher intervention. The network of verifiers that emerge would also create a network of tutors/lecturers. The student could buy lectures and tutorials as well as assessments. These tutorials would also be recorded and posted up to the net so the millions of students around the world are not pointlessly receiving identical tutorials and lectures. The tutorials and lectures could be searched for by key word. We call this “Open Teaching”, a process by which all tutorials and lectures are recorded and published. Opening Teaching would massively reduce the cost of education opening top quality education up to the very poor. Because Spennies is a Cryptocurrency its transaction costs are low. Students could make payment of just a few Spennies to view these lectures and tutorials. Micropayments means the internet education would not require advertising to fund it. Wikipedia is a fantastic example of an open learning resource that is free from the bias of advertising. The Spenny distributed ledgers would give a great amount of reputational information about who verified who irrespective of the exchange of actual Spennies. The actual amount spent purchasing knowledge products would be only one measure of value of the courses, tutorials and verifications. However, it may still seem unfair or unjust that your knowledge capital would be partly measured in financial terms. After all in a reputation based system the actual exchange of money itself is not required to make the market work. But money does make capitalist knowledge selection work more effectively. This is due to the reproduction effect that capital has - capitalist selection results in the accumulation of capital around the most effective products which facilitates their replication. But crucially a money based system would be self financing - no taxation and resultant government intervention. Of course it gives the rich an advantage but the rich have all the cards dealt in their favour by the current education system anyway. And tutoring, course materials and verification provided on a pro-bono basis would have value to the member even if it was provided for free. If the trainer or verifier already has a large knowledge capital of their own and a big reputational foot print in the Spenny system the knowledge provided pro-bono would still be a of great currency in the Spenny system. Student loans taken out in EUROs or dollars for example could be used to fund Spenny tutoring and verification. The Spenny system itself could provide scholarships through the creation of Spennies. The central broker/audit team would have to ensure this money creation did not debase the Spenny currency. It is possible the Spenny currency would be used on the internet for other means than knowledge trade. This would create demand for Spennies and the Spenny central broker could convert this demand for Spennies into finance for Spenny scholarships. Just shopping with Spennies would fund scholarships because it would create demand for Spennies. Spennies could become a lifestyle choice. Knowledge would become a market evolved and refined by competition and capitalist selection. Academics would not publish to each other, they would market their ideas to an internet of hungry learners in the “geekiverse” that Spennies would create. Student learning would not just be student-centred, it would be student-directed. With the university brick and concrete overheads removed, and with learning all “open” (meaning recorded and available on the internet for anyone to view) we could make education open to all at any time and at any age, with any wallet, even for people who just learn for recreation. Learning would be for life not just three years at uni. And Spenny would not have to be just university education, Spennies would benefit any level of education or training. Of course billionaires will still want to send their sons to a Harvard and elitists will pursue an Oxbridge college education for their children. But these institutions will lose total relevance compared to the cauldrons of learning that will be ignited by the free hand of market as it sweeps across the internet, making innovations like Twitter and Facebook seem like mere mile stones on the pathway to the internet truly becoming self actualized. The internet was your library, became your friend and will be your teacher if it isn’t already.